Creating a Commonwealth intelligence culture? Security sector reform and the politics of assistance in building the Tanzanian state, 1945-1989

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• Thomas Maguire
• Tuesday 26 February 2019, 13:10-14:00
• The Richard King Room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Jenny Zhao.

Tanzania’s political, economic and social development has been the focus of numerous studies by both indigenous and foreign scholars. Nevertheless, with the exception of key incidents such as the Zanzibar Revolution and Tanganyika Rifles Mutiny of January 1964, the development of the country’s security sector in the context of state-building either side of independence is not well understood. Neither is the manner in which Tanzania’s security sector interacted with the international community during this period, whether it be the former British colonial power or other states such as Israel, the US, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, China, the Soviet Union and Cuba. This reflects a wider imbalance in Intelligence Studies towards Anglo-American and Western-centric research.

Drawing on overseas archives from the United Kingdom, United States, Israel and Germany, memoirs by former Tanzanian and Stasi officers, and interviews with former officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly MI6 ) and Security Service (MI5), this talk reveals that significant change occurred in Tanzania’s increasingly politicised and unstable security sector from independence in 1961. Mirroring more neighbouring Uganda than Kenya, Britain lost its primary security assistance role, firstly to Israel, then to a shifting consortium of the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, China and Cuba from the 1960s through to the end of the Cold War.

Dr Thomas Maguire is a Junior Research Fellow at Darwin College and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 2015, and a Teaching Fellow in the Intelligence and International Security Research Group at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Tom is also a co-convenor of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, teaches on the Cambridge Security Initiative’s International Security and Intelligence (ISI) specialist short-course, and was the John Garnett Visiting Fellow at the Whitehall-based Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) from 2014-2015.

Tom’s main ongoing project is examining the influence of the UK on the development of state security sectors in the Global South through training and assistance since 1945. This lunchtime talk focuses on one of his case studies in this project: Tanzania. Like all post-colonial states Tanzania’s political, economic and social development has been the focus of numerous studies by both indigenous and foreign scholars.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

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